Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

I give him a small wave, think about how much I fucking hate the way I just waved.

I feel small and girlish next to him, like his height allows me to become one of those fragile women I always wanted to be.

That I was so keen to go back with him that the appeal of it faded until he made up that cleaner excuse and then that friend he was drinking pints with until he wasn’t speaking to me at all. I know I should be annoyed at this sexist construct that requires women to dampen their desires in order to appease men. And I know I should walk away from Josh thinking, Fuck you, why did you ask then if you wanted me to say no? But right now, I don’t care that it’s backwards for me to act in this way. I’m just annoyed that I’m too drunk to have been able to sense that I should have.

For once I’m thankful for his disrespect because Josh will see it, see I’m wanted, when so many of my actions are of someone no one would want

Think about how strange it is that so much of human touch is driven by intuition alone with no awareness of what the other person actually feels, only what you think would feel nice. I suppose that’s what makes it so intimate, touching someone how you would like to be touched, as though their body had become the same thing as yours.

But I guess he’s probably scared of what allowances I will make if he gives me that level of attention. Perhaps I’d turn wild with it, take it in my teeth and run, so he just lies there with his eyes shut until he says, ‘Wanna order an Uber?’

A small, cramped grunt comes out of me. As if he’s punched me in the gut, not kissed me, or filled me up with so much feeling that some of it had to escape out of my mouth otherwise I might explode.

It’s hard to say how much I actually like him and how much I like the untraversable gap he places between us because of what it promises.

But this obsession helps even though it hurts because it distracts me from the bigger pain of Joe. Like how when I got a tattoo on my foot I dug my sharpest nail into the palm of my other hand in order to distract from the sting of the needle going into my toe. As if by spreading out pain over two different areas it becomes diluted.

A part of me feels it’s my fault this has happened, as if by looking for him everywhere I’ve somehow managed to summon his appearance.

There are friends I could have gone to who would have chosen a different story. Who would say, ‘Maybe you guys weren’t good for each other?’ or ‘Him liking her doesn’t take anything from how he felt about you.’ But I didn’t go to them because we have different friends for different things and I didn’t want to confront this interpretation of events.

Really, if you think about it there’s no logical reason why a woman would be ‘too much’ for a man. What would it be like to be with a woman who was genuinely too much? Wouldn’t it just be luxurious?

Women aren’t good at taking criticism. Perhaps because we’re not allowed to be anything but perfect in order to be valued. Men can be all types of wrong and still be wanted.

I smile. ‘Don’t say sorry. My feminism doesn’t include women that date men I’ve gone out with.’

But I’m beginning to understand that even if I crack the code, it would still be over, there’s still no back we could return to. I used to find it frustrating that when it comes to the universe you can’t change what has already happened. But right now, this fact starts to feel kind of reassuring as it shows there’s no point endlessly contemplating tactics for sorting it all out because you couldn’t fix it even if you tried.

So I leave him on Read. And then again when he sends a wave. It feels delicious and new, rejecting someone who rejected me so many times. Like breaking beyond a barrier of possibility.

Alongside all of these, that other thought, the big one that never leaves me – that he has gone and found someone else – stops feeling like a problem and instead becomes a sensation, just like all the other hundreds and thousands of sensations I have had and will have.

And it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life.

I don’t know at what precise point I became a homemaker. When it became some aesthetic requirement for everything to be ordered and exact. I used to have a floordrobe. Turned socks inside out so I could get a second wear out of them.

But eventually it came for me like it did for them, asking me to bring shiny things back to the nest like a magpie.

The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it – can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it. As if the search were the point of the whole thing, not something to be rejected out of hand because it’s too general.

I watched in awe at the way he would come home from work, empty out his pockets onto the bedside table – train tickets, gum packet, a twice-stamped coffee loyalty card – and collapse on the bed without thinking to put that stuff away.

Why did he get to walk over the world as if so little bothered him? So light he seemed to float. The fact that we didn’t have a misting spray for our house plants didn’t itch at his bones.

I don’t want to be this person, I thought again. I want to be the sort of girlfriend who gives blowjobs and gets high. You made me talk to you like this, I thought. I’m not your mother, your maid.

Sometimes self-care is not caring at all.

And we’re all talking, talking, talking and it makes me think about something my mum always says, which is that her favourite thing about women is their ability to chat. The sheer endurance of it is impressive even when taken on its own, but the quality deserves praise too. It’s so much more artful than the way men tend to communicate. Instead of short, sharp snippets of banter, making fun of a friend’s shit haircut or commenting on the good contact made when they slap the back of the other’s ‘pan head’, everything roams and spirals, turns down unexpected corners.

Men say women aren’t funny and I think that’s because they need a badum-bum-tish punchline; they don’t see that the humour is riddled through everything we say, so that everyone’s always laughing a little bit.

I have so much fun with them I stop looking over the shoulders of people to scan the party for men who might give me attention.

I thought love had to come from a boyfriend, but you can find it in friends too.

When I was younger I always thought friends would be the biggest love story of my life.

‘I might actually just go home,’ I say to no one in particular. The idea feels like a revelation and the more time that passes since I said it, the more I realise I want it. Starfished alone over my clean sheets.

Things can happen without you there and you will miss out. But it might give you the strength to be fully there for something else that happens another day.

I’ve always known how to say I love you with food, and by making this food, and making the effort to do all the parts of the recipe that are normally quite boring and time-consuming, I was saying ‘I love you’ to myself. I love you. I love you. I love you. I will try to make sure I do for the rest of my life.

I don’t need Joe’s sadness in order to be happy anymore. I have worked out how to be happy all on my own.

What I didn’t realise is that he taught me all the lessons and I know them off by heart without him now. So, as much as I’m glad that he made me who I am, I’m glad that I’ve been left alone to be her too.

The problem wasn’t him. The problem is that when you idolise men and they prove themselves to be normal, human, you’re disappointed.

Releasing each other might have been our greatest act of love.

I wish I could let the old me see this, though she’d probably be upset by my decision, always more willing to choose him than happiness.

When it was happening, I liked taking it all, but now I felt like I had been given something I didn’t deserve and I wanted to give it all back. You turned over and I fell asleep staring at the back of your head. It looked like a wall.

The sun stays in the sky long enough to convince us to get one more round before heading back to Moya’s to listen to Taylor Swift’s new album.

The tears leak from my eyes now, relieving some of the pressure that’s gathered in me like rocks.

And as I doze off to sleep I think about how easy it is to enjoy life; all you have to do is walk out into it and it comes running with open arms to greet you.

George looks at me with this same focus, as though he’s trying to see all the changing colours of me, when all the other men just see one thing.

I thought it would be the same with love. That I would meet someone I like and the chemical reaction would be so strong that I’d forget how painful breaking up was and throw myself back in a second time without worrying about the consequences. But it hasn’t been like that for me. There is something stopping me from getting there. I didn’t think real people had walls; I thought that was just something people on Love Island said when they actually just didn’t fancy the guy they were coupled up with.

‘The goal is to look like Jake Gyllenhaal in Jarhead.’

I know I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with you, but I am going to spend more of my life with the lessons we learned together, the person you made me into. So in that way, I’m so thankful we broke up when we did, because it means I get to spend more time with her.

‘No, like, not in that way, but I actually do.’ And it sounds weird, but I know exactly what you mean. It’s a love that doesn’t feel like it’s going to burn through my chest, or bring me to tears, send me to your door in the middle of the night. It’s a softer, mellow love that glows in my heart like a warm night light. It makes me proud of who you are now, proud of who I am. It doesn’t ask for anything in return, and it doesn’t ask for me to do anything to prove it. It’s the sun on the back of your neck, it’s the ocean lapping at my feet. ‘I love you,’ I say again, and I’m sure we will for the rest of our lives.